Interview with a member of GDC and of the coordinating group for the Migra Watch team of the People’s Assembly.
Q: What is the People’s Assembly?
A: People’s Assembly is a coalition of organizers and activists representing various groups throughout the metro Detroit area, as well as other concerned residents of the area who wanted to get involved, all coming together to resist the fascist anti-immigrant regime of Trump 2.0 and their agenda to criminalize and marginalize the immigrant community.
Q: When and how did it get started?
A: This all began around December 2024, in large part as a reaction to the re-election of Donald Trump. A lot of folks were feeling understandably very dispirited and helpless in the face of incoming fascism, and wanted not to feel helpless, and wanted to come together to protect themselves and their families and loved ones in their community. We had about 30 organizers or so together at our organizing space in Detroit in December that got the ball rolling as an initial planning meeting. We followed up in late January with a larger open meeting which packed the building with 200 to 300 people which was amazing and showed how strong the effort for resistance against fascism and the scapegoating of immigrants is in this community and, in my opinion, within the United States largely as a whole.
Q: What steps helped to keep it a popular, neighborhood-based movement?
A: We keep things very neighborhood-based for multiple reasons. We want to keep this a popular movement that involves and empowers the local community because we’re here. No one is here to speak for Southwest Detroit or to tell Southwest Detroit what to do. It’s to engage Southwest Detroit and get ourselves organized in the face of repression to make sure that we all know everybody in the community knows how to protect and defend ourselves.
We keep things neighborhood-based so we can focus on engaging the residents of that area, making sure that we don’t stretch ourselves too thin and over-commit by trying to start work in places where we’re not prepared for it. We may do monthly meetings that are open to the public to make sure that we are drawing folks in from all over the area and that people can engage with us and make their voices heard and get involved to whatever extent they choose to do so, so that we can keep things focused and at the same time broad enough so that we are still covering all the needs of the people.
Shortly after our big meeting, where we had hundreds of folks showing up, Southwest Detroit was hit with major flooding due to inadequate care by our city government on the sewage system of the pipes. Pipes burst underground, causing large-scale flooding in various areas around Southwest Detroit. A lot of people lost their homes or had to leave their homes for a while. A lot of people lost most of their possessions.
It was very devastating and required a lot of work to address such a crisis. I am proud to say that the People’s Assembly did fairly successfully.
Initially, we came up with three teams of Migra Watch, our political education team, which focuses on spreading “know your rights” information throughout the community and working with businesses to try to push ICE out of the community and, just engaging with propaganda in that way, as well as our mutual aid team which works to coordinate response to support families of detained people and immigrant families in general who need support, whether it is food, clothing, transportation, anything like that.
Q: How did the City of Detroit respond? How did the people respond? [to the flood]
A: The flooding made mutual aid work essential and outweighed the needs of the other two teams at that specific moment. I think we pretty successfully pivoted to doing our own mutual aid work and supporting local non-profits who were getting resources out to the community in a meaningful way.
We had a lot of People’s Assembly folks out there doing their due diligence, passing out food, water and clothing and helping run those tents and helping folks coordinate shelter to get them to hotels if their houses weren’t livable, coordinating cleanup teams, helping to do Migra Watch patrols to make sure that people weren’t in danger of being picked up at mutual aid sites or when they were coming to get resources.
I think we pretty successfully pivoted, and it was really essential to demonstrate that we were going to be there to show up for the community, especially in a time of crisis, where the city was not stepping up at all. The city was dragging its feet with repairs and sending representatives out to people’s homes that needed fixing with legal paperwork, trying to get them to sign it, to release them from any liability if the city was to send in cleanup crews. I think the community was very aware that this was how the city was going to operate, which is why people stepped up to support each other through mutual aid in such a big way and why it was, I think, as successful as it was and as important as it was for us to do that work because the community knew we were more or less on our own and did not to expect major support from our city government.
Q: What is Migra Watch and how does it defend immigrants against ICE?
A: Migra Watch is essentially a neighborhood patrol to keep an eye out for ICE detentions and ICE raids, so that we can have a rapid response to repression that we see actively happening in the community. If we’re able to catch a detention or a raid taking place in real time, we try to send organizers and folks out there who can support either the person who’s being detained with legal advice and getting their information to pass on to their family, helping family or whoever else arrange a tow if the person’s car was abandoned, which often happens if somebody gets detained on the road, and following up with them to make sure they’re connected with our mutual aid resources.
We are working to make sure that, if we do see detentions or raids happening in a certain area that we’re spreading the word in the community so that folks are aware and know to stay away from certain areas at certain times if there’s stuff going down. We are working on building ourselves up to the point where we can be strong enough and have coordinated responses with enough people to actively do direct actions against raids and detentions if we see them taking place. Obviously, direct action protests are risky for a variety of reasons. When you engage with law enforcement, you have to go into it very aware of what you’re doing and what can go wrong so that you’re prepared for any eventuality.
So we’re kind of working our way up to that still, and making sure we have enough people power and a coordinated enough response that if we were to try to engage with that, we’d be doing it right. That is a goal of the team as well.
Q: What are some lessons learned thus far from organizing with the People’s Assembly and Migra Watch?
A: The biggest lesson I’ve learned from doing this work with People’s Assembly and Migra Watch is to temper some expectations and to engage with folks from outside your own circles. I say temper expectations because when we had that meeting at the beginning of the year, hundreds of people showed up, and it was really great. But, you shouldn’t always expect for that momentum to carry into the actual work itself, because out of those hundreds of people that show up, there’s probably going to be like maybe a hundred, if that, that keep following up and showing up to engage with the work and make sure it’s a sustained effort with coordinated movement and momentum instead of just a moment. You have to temper expectations and be aware of the fact that if hundreds of people show up to a thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have hundreds of people every time you show up and that you’re going to be able to have that much people power when you’re doing the real organizing and engaging, which is a long-term sustained effort. It’s not just one individual moment or one individual meeting or protest.
At the same time, it’s really important to engage with folks outside your own group as well, because I’ve found that some of the most dedicated and useful people to have around in People’s Assembly and Migra Watch have been folks that we didn’t even have on our radar as organizers to begin with. I think what comes to mind for me is some of the residents. Folks who just live around here. They weren’t affiliated with any organization. They’re not here to represent anyone or any group. They were just concerned people who saw their friends and neighbors and family members, oftentimes, even themselves, put in danger by the encroaching fascist regime and just decided to step up and do something about it. Those people have been some of the most reliable folks that we’ve had in this work.
So don’t just limit yourself to talking to the people that you know, or only taking seriously the engagement and the constructive criticism from the people you know. It’s often just as much the people we didn’t know at first that end up being the best and most useful, and reliable comrades.
Q: How are the youth taking the lead in this project, this movement?
A: Youth have been playing a big part in the movement as well. The People’s Assembly has a great number of people 30 and under who are important and play important roles in the organization. We also make sure to support youth work in the community when they are engaging in similar work as ours. You know, we’ve supported student walkouts from schools to protest the anti-immigration policies of this regime, and all sorts of stuff like that. Youth is very important to engage with and to continue to keep new blood and new ideas flowing through your organization.
The folks who are older and who’ve amassed knowledge throughout the years are very important to listen to, but it’s also equally important to listen to folks coming in with youth and energy and new ideas. It’s going to take all of us together, and the youth especially, because they’re the ones who are going to be leading us throughout the rest of the future to engage with.
Q: If a comrade reading this wants to get involved, what is the first step?
A: Get in touch with anybody from the Detroit chapter, all of us here in Detroit engage with People’s Assembly to some extent or another. It’s one of, if not our main project, for this city in this chapter. We can direct you where you need to go if you’re trying to get involved and help out. We’re taking all new-comers because it’s going to take all of us to fight these motherfuckers.
Originally published in:
